THE NAVY ON LAND
The American Navy did work important and memorable on land as well
as upon the sea. Its Marine Corps fought in decisive battles with
unsurpassed courage, daring, endurance and aggressiveness and some
of its big guns were instrumental in more quickly bringing to pass,
unexpectedly early, the order to “cease firing.”
The Marine Corps, the landing and fighting force of the Navy, added
glowing pages to its already splendid record. As with every other
fighting force of the United States, it had first to increase its
numbers and train its new members. It had a total, when we entered
the war, of 14,000 officers and men. At the end of the war it had
70,000, the new members having come, mainly by enlistment, from all
classes of the community and including business, professional, working
and college men. In one instance a whole college battalion enlisted
together. Marine Corps service has always attracted young men of the
highest quality and these new members were especially notable for their
intelligence, spirit and fine soldierly character, qualities that shone
brilliantly in their action in the lines of battle. More democratic
than any other fighting force of the nation, the Marine Corps officers
are mainly promoted from its rank. Several officers’ training camps
were held at which intensive, practical and competitive work gave
thorough training in quick time and yielded a plentiful supply of
officers chosen in accordance with the work and character of the men.
Certain quotas of the Students’ Army Training Corps, which was hard at
work when the armistice was signed, were designated for Marine Corps
service. Recruiting and training stations for the Corps were increased
and enlarged and intensive training of the recruits went on steadily,
with such especial attention to rifle practice that when the Marines
drove the enemy back at Belleau Wood over 90 per cent of the men in
line had qualified as marksmen, sharp shooters or expert riflemen.
When the German Army, in its steady drive toward Paris in the last days
of May, 1918, had reached its nearest point to the capital city and the
Allied armies were facing a serious crisis. General Pershing offered
to Marshal Foch whatever he had in men and material that the French
Generalissimo could use and a division composed of regiments of Marines
and of the Regular Army was thrown forward to block the German advance,
which had been rolling steadily onward and driving everything before
it at the rate of six or seven miles per day. The Marines blocked the
advance in an engagement on June 2nd. Calmly setting their rifle sights
and aiming with precision, they met the German attack and under their
deadly fire, supported by machine guns and artillery, the enemy lines
wavered, stopped, and broke for cover.
Then followed, a few days later, the fierce and stubborn attacks of the
Marines upon the defenses which the Germans had set up and which they
held with determination. Belleau Wood, a jungle of underbrush, heavy
foliage and piles of boulders, they had filled with machine gun nests.
The Marines attacked in wave formation, rushing, halting, rushing
again, the rear waves plunging forward over the dead and wounded bodies
of those who had fallen. It was almost a month before the Americans
reached their final objectives and completely routed the Germans from
Belleau Wood, to be known ever after as the Wood of the American
Marines because of the valor and heroism with which it was won. They
fought day and night, day after day, much of the time without sleep or
water or hot food. Their officers sent back messages that the men were
exhausted and must be relieved and were told that the lines must hold
and if possible continue to attack. And the lines again went forward.
They fought from tree to tree, they charged machine gun nests with the
bayonet, wiped them out and turned the guns against the retreating foe.
Some companies lost every commissioned officer, some that had entered
the battle 250 strong dwindled to fifty or sixty. The Germans threw in
fresh troops, their best Prussian Guards, with orders to retake the
lost positions at whatever cost. But the Marines and their fellows
of the Regular Army held on, repulsed the fresh attacks, and slowly
advanced their positions. And at last, toward the end of June, with
some reënforcements and following an artillery barrage that tore the
woods into fragments, the Marines made their final successful rushes
and with rifle and bayonet cleaned out all the remaining machine gun
nests. The enemy had been turned back, Paris had been saved, the morale
of the best German troops had been undermined and the Allied commanders
and armies had been shown what raw American troops could do. After the
battle of Belleau Wood neither British nor French commanders had any
doubt about sending American troops anywhere, no matter whether they
had had much or little training and little or no experience.
At Soissons, in July, the Marines again showed their valor and at the
battle of St. Mihiel, in mid-September, they took over a portion of
the line and, attacking with two days’ objectives ahead of them, won
them all by mid-afternoon of the first day. And early in October the
Second Division, brigaded with the French and still composed of Marines
and Regulars, swept forward in an attack on Blanc Mont Ridge, east of
Rheims, the keystone of the German main position, for the possession
of which German and Allied Armies had fought many bitter battles. The
Marines and their companions attacked the rugged and wooded Blanc Mont,
rushed the enemy before them across its summit and pushed him down the
slope, repulsed counter attacks and forced the Germans to fall back
from before Rheims and yield positions they had held for four years.
The casualty list of the Marine Corps amounted to about 6,000, of
whom only 57 were captured by the enemy. They lost approximately half
of their numbers who entered battle. But they took more prisoners
than they lost, all told, of their own men, and they inflicted more
casualties than they received.
The big guns sent by the Navy to France for land warfare played an
important part in the decisive battles of the last few weeks of
the war. These huge, 14-inch guns, 66 feet long, had been intended
originally for the new battle cruisers, but a change of ship design
had made them available for other uses and the Navy Bureau of Ordnance
suggested that they be put on railway mounts and used on land. They
were first offered to the British authorities for use behind their
lines, but they doubted the effectiveness of the guns and delayed final
answer until General Pershing asked for them. At the end of December,
1917, not a drawing for the mounts had been started. Four months later
one of the guns was rolling on the wheels of a completed mount for long
range tests at the Sandy Hook Proving Ground. At the end of hostilities
forty-four guns and mounts had been sent over in various steps of
preparation for the front and six of the monsters had been in action,
throwing their destructive shells far behind the German lines.
The railway mounts, designed for this particular purpose, were built
and covered with armor plate by the Navy according to plans and designs
prepared by its Ordnance Bureau, while the locomotives and the twelve
cars for the operating forces of each gun, including berth and kitchen
cars, armored ammunition cars, machine shop cars containing everything
from a forge and anvil to a handsaw, crane and wireless cars, were all
built and equipped especially for the purposes of these land batteries
of naval guns. Intensive training was given to the men, all of them
taken from naval forces, who would operate the huge batteries in France
and serve the guns in action. The whole battery was so mobile that even
if it were in action when the order came to move, the gun, personnel
and entire train of cars could be put under way in an hour.
The first gun to be sent landed in France in the latter part of June
but did not go into action against the enemy until mid-September, when,
placed near Soissons, it fired on the railroads entering Laon. It had
been intended for use against the German “Big Bertha” that had been
dropping shells upon Paris from a distance of over seventy miles, but
on the day in August when the American gun was ready to begin action
“Big Bertha” retired and was heard of no more.
The German long range guns which bombarded Paris and Dunkirk and other
places were set on permanent steel and concrete foundations, and
therefore were immobile, and the military efficiency of their shells
was reduced by the fact that they were small and made for long flight.
The enormous shells of the American guns had a range of thirty miles,
weighed 400 pounds each, seven times as much as the German, and could
penetrate eight feet of solid concrete. Each gun, without its mount,
weighed more than a hundred tons. They fired heavier projectiles and
had a greater range than any mobile land artillery that had previously
been used. Their chief usefulness was in the destruction of ammunition
dumps and of railroad yards and rolling stock and the consequent
demoralization of the enemy’s transportation system. When the shells
from one of the guns were directed upon the railroad stations and yards
of Montmedy and Longuyon they stopped all traffic there and one which
struck the German headquarters killed twenty-eight members of the
general’s staff.
Cruising through France like battleships on wheels, demonstrating their
perfect mobility and proving their usefulness by cutting the enemy’s
lines of communication and seriously obstructing his transportation,
these big naval guns on railway mounts proved their value so
triumphantly that the Navy had been requested, when the end came, to
provide as many more as it could rush quickly to the front.
The Navy also removed a number of 7-inch guns from battleships, the
changed conditions of warfare demanding a lighter and quicker firing
gun, and devised for them, at General Pershing’s request, a new type
of mount, utilizing the principle of the caterpillar belt and thus
making it possible for them to travel directly over any kind of ground.
So satisfactory were the first tests that the Army asked the Navy to
furnish 36 such guns and mounts as quickly as possible and these were
being rushed to completion when the armistice was signed.
The Navy maintained a large personnel and carried on considerable
operations on shore both in Great Britain and France. On the coast of
each of these countries was a series of bases for the repair and upkeep
of escorting and patrolling ships, from cruisers to converted yachts.
In many cases it was necessary to construct complete repair plants.
At every naval base overseas there was a fully equipped hospital. In
Scotland the Navy took over an entire watering place whose hotels,
bath-houses and other structures were converted into large hospital
buildings wherein were cared for many British as well as our own sick
and wounded.